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Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE to arrive on Sprint soon

We haven’t seen many phones with QWERTY keyboards lately, and I know a lot of people still want them, provided they offer some decent specs and the latest version of Android. Motorola is trying to aim for that here with the Photon Q, a LTE phone with a QWERTY keyboard and Android 4.0, which is not exactly the latest version of Android, but close enough.

The phone comes with a dual core 1.5 Ghz processor (most likely the S4), an 8MP camera, NFC, a 4.3″ “Color Boost” display, which I assume has an HD resolution, although at this 4.3″ size it’s possible Motorola went with qHD. The Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE is supposed to be a “world phone”, so even though it’s on Sprint, and it uses its LTE network, it should work with GSM carriers from other countries without problems.

The Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE is obviously the successor to last year’s Photon 4G, and even the shape seems similar. The main difference is that it will have a physical QWERTY keyboard, while the Photon 4G didn’t have one. One other big advantage of the new Photon is that Motorola has apparently figured out the locked bootloaders mess, and it has supposedly found a much better way to lock its bootloader, while also making it easy for developers to unlock it.

This might be the second time I notice a big influence from Google, the first one being after Moto started using a very stock-like Android user interface. Hopefully, we’ll see more such positive news in the future. Maybe in the future we won’t even have to use “4G LTE” after every single phone’s name. Anything is possible.

Pricing and availability of this phone will be announced “in the next few weeks”.